The business model is perfectly sustainable and the same as all the other brokers. Commissions were purely extra income.

The problem is that Robinhood is a young tech company and the "move fast and break things" approach doesn't work when it comes to industries that need reliability and risk management.

I'm surprised they got away unscathed from the lack of proper margin calculations before. That should've led to major fines.

Ah, sure, this is what I meant by it not being sustainable. They keep fucking up in standard SV ways, eventually FINRA or maybe even the SEC will come down hard. The basic brokerage business seems fine.

The biggest impact Robinhood has had is pushing other brokers to go to zero commission models. I joined before that happened, but I will be moving my trading portfolio elsewhere.

I’m surprised more people on here aren’t using something like https://alpaca.markets. It’s primarily for algo trading, but there’s nothing stopping you from using it generally, as it is an API, after all.

This is awesome, I was just talking to my friend about an API first brokerage. Glad to see someone's already made one.

Wow, I'm surprised I hadn't found this before. I was looking for something exactly like this at some point in the past 6 months and didn't find much, so thanks for sharing this!

So is Fidelity now, but you don't have to deal with this Mickey Mouse operation.

just FYI I believe every other major US broker offers zero commissions now

Do they all make the money selling trading data do HFT companies now?